News and commentary on film

Main menu

Post navigation

Oscar trendspotting

A few trends spotted at this year’s Academy Awards, offered for your consideration for those future betting pools.

Getting small: The best picture presentation snafu obscured something that future prognosticators should pay attention to. The winner, “Moonlight,” was by far the lowest budgeted, at $1.5 million, of the nine nominees, and that was even in a year in which several contenders were made for less than $10 million.

The trend for at least the last 10 years has been for such lower- to middle-budget films to win. Perhaps the most expensive over that period was “Argo,” which cost $44.5 million, a budget that in its year dwarfed the bargain-priced likes of competitors “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Amour,” but was in turn far less than “Life of Pi” and “Les Miserables.”

This year, “Arrival” was the highest budgeted contender, at $47 million, with “Hacksaw Ridge” just behind at $40 million, presumably most of which went for its intestines budget. But even those can’t compare with the most expensive films of 2016, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Captain America: Civil War,” which both topped out at $250 million.

Few of the nominees are likely to earn what those blockbusters did, though “La La Land” is at $370 million worldwide and “Hidden Figures” at $185 million and climbing. Still, the return on investment is hard to argue with: The films cost $30 million and $25 million, respectively.

The other direction: Whereas the best picture trend is for smaller, more socially conscious work, the key to winning directing prize continues to be razzle-dazzle.

It’s now six years in a row, beginning with Michel Hazanavicius for “The Artist,” that the directing prize has gone to the most spectacular, technologically ground-breaking work. Consider Alejandro G. Iñárritu for first “Birdman,” then “The Revenant”; Alfonso Cuarón for “Gravity”; and Ang Lee for “Life of Pi,” and you’ll see a group of filmmakers devoted to advancing technology via CGI to instill a sense of wonder in audiences. One might argue that for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the picture prize goes for the arts, and the directing prize for the sciences. Or maybe it’s just that the membership is schizoid.

Split the difference: For the last five years, only once has the Academy given the same film the best picture and the best director Oscars. That would be “Birdman” and Iñárritu. In the five years before that, though, they were in lockstep.

Prior to the win for “Argo” in 2012, splitting those two top prizes had only happened 22 out of 84 times. With Damien Chazelle’s directing win and the best picture Oscar going to “Moonlight,” we now can make that 26 out of 89, a roughly 29 percent rate.

One has to go back to Oscar’s earliest years to find such a trend: In the first five years — as in the last five — there was only one film-director matchup: Lewis Milestone and “All Quiet on the Western Front.” In the following five years, there were two others: Frank Capra for “It Happened One Night” and Frank Lloyd for “Cavalcade.” Thereafter, though there would be exceptions — notably for John Ford, who won a record four directing Oscars, but only saw one of those movies, “How Green Was My Valley” win best picture; and for Alfred Hitchcock, whose only film to win the Oscar was “Rebecca,” but who never was judged good enough for the directing statuette himself — by and large, those two awards almost always would be in sync.

That conventional wisdom now is out the window. I initially believed that there would be such a split this year, though I wasn’t sure whether it would be Chazelle/”Moonlight,” as turned out to be the case, or Barry Jenkins/”La La Land,” given the praise lavished on both leading contenders. But the groundswell for “La La Land” had me questioning the evidence.

I should have trusted my instincts — as I did when I predicted Donald Trump’s win. But that’s another — sad! — story.

Suckers for a pretty face. Nothing against Emma Stone, but it was a laugh-out-loud moment when she beat Isabelle Huppert for best actress. (Hmmm. Maybe that category got the wrong envelope too??) And that’s because Oscar just can’t help lavishing love on ingénue types.

Oscar has a long, long history of giving best actress honors to pretty young things; winners 40 and older represent about 27 percent of the total. Over the last 10 years, there have been exceptions: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett. But they and the Helen Mirrens, Kathy Bateses and Frances McDormands of moviedom are outliers in a parade that includes such youthful winners as Natalie Portman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Jennifer Lawrence and Brie Larson, and clearly it takes a show-stopping performance that stops the culture in its tracks to pull it off. Huppert’s role in “Elle” should’ve been that performance … but for those doggone subtitles. (She’ll just have to content herself with having won every critics’ prize in the books, and hope that maybe someday she’ll be as good an actress as Stone. Lol!)

By the way, many, if not all, of these young actresses gave awardworthy performances. But the trend clearly reflects one uncomfortable truth, and that is that there just aren’t a lot of challenging roles in Hollywood for women over 40. Too bad nobody onstage followed Blanchett’s lead from a few years ago and took Tinseltown to task over its ageism and strange bromance with male-centric movies.

No complaints about the other acting categories, though. Viola Davis (51, incidentally) was overdue, although she should have been contending in the actress category; Mahershala Ali’s work is hard to argue with. And Casey Affleck became the rare actor to win for a performance that subtly suggested reserves of emotion beneath the surface, instead of going all big, splashy and teary. (Are you listening, Leonardo?) That, I wouldn’t consider a trend.